I was having a conversation with someone on another forum that I regular, and they went off on me about how Gentoo sucks. I told him precisely why I believe Gentoo is better (the fact that you compile the source and therefore it's better suited to run on your machine).

He simply replied that 95% of those who use Gentoo use standard flags that really give no advantage to the user, and the other 5% don't know what the heck they're doing and use flags that make everything run slower.

Actually, to top it off, he said Gentoo ran only as fast, if not faster, than Redhat, Slack, and Mandrake...

What in the world. Personally, I can tell a difference between my Gentoo install and my previous Redhat install. What's the deal with these people? He can't possibly be right..._________________"My downfall raises me to infinite heights." -Napoleon Bonaparte

I'm sure at least 50% of people who use Gentoo don't know what they're doing, but I'd also say that 80% of all _computer_ users don't know what they're doing, regardless of OS.

Gentoo is popular right now. People do one of two things when something is popular. Jump on the bandwagon or attack it. Unfortunatly thats where Gentoo is right now. People either love it, or they're going to cite all kinds of 'facts' about why its bad. Look at the reactions to Linux itself amoung Windows users. There is all kinds of misinformation out there being spread by people who don't know what they're talking about. Why? Because its something different, something popular, something they don't know much about. Therefore the natural responce is to attack it.

This guy is doing pretty much the same thing. Tell him to install it and use it for 6 months and if he isn't hooked on Portage and USE flags, then he can go back to Red Hat with a smirk. Until then, he has nothing to say worth listening to. _________________Go find a cheerleader and saw her legs off. - Nny

I like Gentoo because I can trim the fat. Not so much the .0002% speed increase from compiling code and gcc can only do so much anyways, for the software that doesn't need CPU specific extentions like SSE/2 or 3DNow.

Personally, I just find the speed boost a happy side effect of running Gentoo. It is apparently quicker than my old Mandrake install, but that's a very subjective thing. It's quite hard tell if it is actually quicker.

I think the biggest benefit of running Gentoo is that it's a learning experience. I'm pretty good with computers, and managed to install Mandrake with no problems - but I didn't really know how it did anything. I did look into Linux from Scratch, but decided that was a bit much - Gentoo is a very happy mid point.

You get to see what you have, what is more current/unstable, and you can upgrade easily. A great way to keep on top of all those patched programs, too.

How about not looking for rpms or worrying about rpm dependencies or worrying which glibc was used to compile the binary you want to use?

It's also crazy to assume all Gentoo users compile everything. ie. I grab OpenOffice and Mozilla binaries from www.mozilla.org but everything else is compiled for my system.

How about never wiping your hard disk to install a new release of a distro? Once you start with Gentoo, you have the latest as easily as running emerge world. How about never waiting for a new binary to be made up that supports your system?

This is the only distribution (after using slackware, caldera (yes yes) redhat, lycoris (yes I tried it), suse, and mandrake) that I have stuck with longterm. Using this distro encourages and empowers me to take charge of my system, understand how it works beneath the gui and resolve problems.

Why? Because all the processor specific extensions (SSE2) are already built into i686. So there's nothing "new" you gain, just a couple of timing tweaks.

Now i686 and proc specific give you an advantage over i586, which dont have those extensions built in.

Conclusion: ArchLinux, Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, etc are all just as fast as almost any gentoo install, because they are all i686 optimized.

Hence: Gentoo sucks.

I agree, fusibou... Really, the advantages are great. Not only does it feel "speedier" than other distros, the fact that I can upgrade everything with one command is just awesome._________________"My downfall raises me to infinite heights." -Napoleon Bonaparte

That makes no sense. Gentoo sucks because other things are compiled with i686? Ok, so lets say that compiling software makes absolutly no difference speed wise. He quoted Slackware as one of his examples. Excuse me if I'm wrong, but don't you have to compile everything with Slackware? As far as I knew, Slackwares package management are simply tarballs.

Gentoo is a source based distro. If Gentoo sucks for this guy because he doesn't want to compile software from source, then Slackware, LFS, etc suck as well. But Gentoo is more than CFLAGS. Gentoo is Portage, USE flags, and the ability to completly customize what is installed on your system. Gentoos' package management system is far superior to anything else out there. The dependancy checking alone is worth the install.

Again, I say this guy should use Gentoo for at least 6 months before he wants to say it sucks. Anyone I've ever met thats used Portage for any length of time will never go back to RPMs._________________Go find a cheerleader and saw her legs off. - Nny

First, about the speed issue, I've installed both Slack and Gentoo on an eMachine and I also experienced a definite difference in speed. I DO NOT mean to knock Slack in any way. Slackware is a great distro and I learned more than I can list while using it. But there certainly was a speed difference, especially when using large apps like Mozilla. And saying that Gentoo sucks because most people do not take full advantage of the optimizations is nonsense. One could use the same argument saying that Linux sucks because half of the people use a non-optimized (ie. stock) kernel and the other half waste time configuring a custom kernel for minimal benefit. Why not use Windows because obviously nobody needs that much control?

Other Gentoo bashing came in response to the news that Portage was ported to BSD. Most of the people were of the opinion that Portage is a cheap imitation POS because FreeBSD already has the ports system which is _vastly_ superior. What all of the slashdot posts (no surprise ) failed to grasp was that running Portage on BSD is a step towards GentooBSD, not an attempt to replace ports on an already existing BSDistro.

So, yes, there are plenty of Gentoo bashers. It seems that most of them have an already set way of thinking and are not going to change until they want to, not because a Gentoo evangelist tells them to. Probably the best course of action is to casually promote Gentoo, but don't lose sleep over it

Why? Because all the processor specific extensions (SSE2) are already built into i686. So there's nothing "new" you gain, just a couple of timing tweaks.

Now i686 and proc specific give you an advantage over i586, which dont have those extensions built in.

Conclusion: ArchLinux, Slackware, Redhat, Mandrake, etc are all just as fast as almost any gentoo install, because they are all i686 optimized.

Hence: Gentoo sucks.

I agree, fusibou... Really, the advantages are great. Not only does it feel "speedier" than other distros, the fact that I can upgrade everything with one command is just awesome.

Well, for starters you can tell the guy that he is incorrect.

Let me quote from the man pages of gcc (He can verify it himself if he don't belive you):

man gcc wrote:

While picking a specific cpu-type will schedule things appropriately for that particular chip, the compiler will not generate any code that does not run on the i386 without the -march=cpu-type option being used. i586 is equivalent to pentium and i686 is equivalent to pentiumpro. k6 and athlon are the AMD chips as opposed to the Intel ones.

So, he is comparing what flags are turned on for a Pentium Pro vs a Pentium 4. Clearly those 2 chips are very different in design and quite a few of the SSE/SSE2 was not available for this chip. The old Pentium Pro family also is different internally when it comes to arranging instructions for the execution pipeline. I suggest that you point your friend to www.intel.com and have him look up the specs for a P4 and P-Pro. Quite a bit of difference when it comes to optimization.

Also tell him that the reason why RH, SuSE, Mandrake et al is using i686 is that they will then cover almost all of the Pentium based PC's out there, whether it's a Pentium II, III or a 4.

If he has a P4 based PC, ask him to write a couple of easy tests and compile them with i686 and pentium4 and see the difference. If he still continue to claim that there is no difference between them, ask him where he found the information because it is plain wrong.

I suspect that your friend has little or no knowledge about CPU's and compilers.

Erik_________________'Yes, Firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'

I talked to a physicist where I interned this summer, and he ran Debian (I forget what exactly). When I said I ran Gentoo, he said "A bit much, no?" and I just said "nope" and went off to lunch. This guy was a theoretical physicst, a genius, and he seemed to know what he was doing with Linux, but I guess people just get stuck in a mindset and their distro is better than yours, "just because". I'm guilty of that, but hey, give everyone some slack (not slackware :p). If they don't like what you run, sucks for them, cause you'll keep running it, and they don't have to deal with it.

Before I state anything, let me say that I am a former Gentoo user and currently a Slackware user.

First, concerning CFLAGS: in my experience they seem to make very little difference in most applications. They help out with some programs like mplayer (if you just do a standard ./configure && make && make install it compiles with -O4 -march=(your CPU) among other flags) and other very CPU intensive applications. Day to day applications, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla...I notice no difference between Slackware's march=i486/mcpu=i686, Arch's march=i686 and Gentoo's march=pentium3 (in my case).

Second, concerning users not knowing what they're doing: I would wager alot of people running Gentoo don't understand optimization flags. I know I didn't the first time I installed it. My CFLAGS were something like "-O3 -march=pentium3 -mmmx -msse -ffast-math -fmpmath=sse,387 -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe -funroll-loops -falign-functions=4" or something like that and probably a few others I've forgotten...I got those flags off of these forums somewhere, I didn't really understand what they did. The result: a broken system. Several packages just flat out wouldn't compile. I'd have to override the emerge with safer CFLAGs. The programs that did compile actually seemed to run slower than my previous Slackware 8.1 installation. (Remember, I don't really think the flags matter that much, but it seemed a little slower). Of course I ignored the fact that the optimizations I used greatly increased the size of binaries -- particularly for programs like Mozilla. That doesn't help much when your system has a very small cache, hence why everything was so slow. (For reference, I used more conservative flags on a subsequent Gentoo install...it seemed quicker than the broken Gentoo install, but not any different than Slackware).

Also, to avoid confusion, as mentioned somewhere before Slackware uses binary packages. The packages are just tarballs, but then, so are RPMs and DEBs when you get right down to it, Slackware's packages just don't have the metadata that specify dependencies, etc. that RPMs and DEBs do. Also, there are many contributed Slackware packages available at linuxpackages.net if you need software not avialable for Slackware. I'm using the Evolution package (and required deps) from there and it runs great. Some programs you will have to (or may want to) compile yourself. For example, I've compiled mplayer myself. Fortunately, Slackware packages are very easy to make so I've packaged it and can easily remove it if I wish or add it to a freshly installed system.

Concerning single-command upgrades: they are available in many distributions. Debian was the first (I believe) with apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade. Redhat users can use up2date or apt4rpm to do things similarly. Some other RPM distros use yum, which can also upgrade all packages with a single command. In Arch, just run pacman -Syu. Even Slackware can do this using swaret available in the extra/ packages, swaret --update --up-all

Concerning the "learning experience:" I'm not really sure. I learned most of what I know about Linux from using and customizing Slackware 8.1. What I *did* learn from the Gentoo installs (and am very glad I did) is how to properly customize and compile a kernel. I've used a custom kernel on every distro I've used since.

The only thing that really set Gentoo apart for me were USE flags. For example, if you are never going to use a palm pilot, then don't put it in your use flags and your system won't include any support for it. You won't require packages like gnome-pilot or pilot-link like people using other distros. If this is important to you, then Gentoo is the distro for you.

Why do I use Slackware and not Gentoo? Compiling takes too long on my laptop. I much prefer downloading a package and installing it in a few moments than having my laptop compile programs for hours just to take advantage of USE flags (which I don't much care about, to be honest).

All that said, I don't really care what distribution you use. If you enjoy running Gentoo, more power to you. If you like Slack, great. If you're a Debian user (and don't intend to come burn down my house because I'm using mplayer *gasp*) then that's fine too. Use what you like and don't let what others say affect your own opinions. There is plenty of ignorance on both sides of the fence.

Last edited by Toth on Tue Sep 30, 2003 3:16 am; edited 1 time in total

Speed isn't even the point! Sure, the extra 2% you gain from optimizing for your CPU is nice, but that's not main the reason to use Gentoo. It's about control. I have two words for the anti-Gentoo critics: "use variables". That's the power of Gentoo, being able to choose whether or not you want to install all of KDE just to get arts, or whether you want to enable gnome support in Abiword. No RPM-based distro can do that.

Why do I use Slackware and not Gentoo? Compiling takes too long on my laptop. I much prefer downloading a package and installing it in a few moments than having my laptop compile programs for hours just to take advantage of USE flags (which I don't much care about, to be honest).

Yep. That's the best reason not to use Gentoo. That and Gentoo is still a young dist so it isn't as trusted as say Red Hat or Debian.

But with the compiling issue, Moore's Law should take care of that.

One advantage no one mentioned though is that Gentoo supports ppc, x86, alpha, sparc, hppa and amd64 without having to keep a seperate package repository. And new architectures can be added to the list fairly easily. It's one of the powers of source based distributions.

One advantage no one mentioned though is that Gentoo supports ppc, x86, alpha, sparc, hppa and amd64 without having to keep a seperate package repository. And new architectures can be added to the list fairly easily. It's one of the powers of source based distributions.

I'm going to have to pull a corny "quality over quantity" line here. Sure Gentoo supports many platforms, but how well? PPC still lags behind x86 with some packages that don't even have any PPC keywords. It's obvious that x86 excels more than the other platforms, Gentoo is a community driven distro and thus the platform most available to people will get more attention.

Furthermore, off the top of my head I know of one example: sim-icq. That app compiles and runs fine on x86, compiles fine on PPC but does not run properly. Messages are not being parsed properly and contain the ICQ protocol characters not meant to be seen by the user. I'm sure there may be more instances similar to this_________________* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee

You know something, as a two week old noobie, I have learned more about linux than I could have imagined. Two weeks ago, I was quite intimated by the Gentoo installation process. I used genkernel to compile my kernel. Now I can upgrade and/or recompile my own kernel, with the help of genkernel --config (not by choice though, seems that genkernel creates its own logs so when I try to recompile the kernel manually, I get a load of errors due to certain files being missing). Today I was able to get my printer and zip drive to work. Tomorrow I want to see if I can install ALSA. Finally, I would like to see if I can get my notebook to detect my firewire external hard drive. I am quite the newbie but I am enjoying this _________________My Company: Hakata Consulting

i have heard some people bash gentoo just becasue of the install (to be honest i wasn't to thrilled with it when i was installing)_________________A computer without a Microsoft operating system is like a dog without bricks tied to its head.

Well my experience with RedHat installs, it was either hit or miss. At least with Gentoo I have a (better) chance. And what about all those people that knock the Debian installer? I'm surprised the Debian folks haven't adopted Knoppix's or Morphix's installer (both are Debian distros). I installed Morphix (same as Debian Unstable) on my desktop and the installer really puts to shame many other distros._________________* Blessing /dev/hda2 with holy penguin pee